digital business ecosystems - delphi group · architecting ecosystems innovation through higher...
TRANSCRIPT
Digital Business
Ecosystems
In a world where everything is connected,
everything matters. Today's connections mean
ever expanding, richer networks are emerging.
They're called Digital Business Ecosystems, and
they represent a radical shift in the most
fundamental aspects of creating new value.
An evolutionary leap in value creation
©2016 ArrayWorks
The Tipping Point
The Economic Impact of Connecting Everything and Everyone
Architecting Ecosystems
SBLI Case Study
Key Opportunities And Imperatives Of Digital Ecosystems
Working From The Outside In - Strategies For Leveraging Digital Business Ecosystems
The Most Significant Shift in BPM
A New Platform For Building Digital Business Ecosystems
Visualizing Entire Ecosystems
Conclusion
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Ta b l e O f C o n t e n t s
1
International Data Corporation (IDC)
estimates there are 9.1 billion connected "things”
today, with projections of 28 billion by 2020 and
over 50 billion by 2025. World-wide, the
continuously expanding Internet of Things (IoT)
ecosystem is enormous. Valued at $655.8 billion in
2014, it is expected to represent $2 trillion of
economic impact in the next decade.1
Further evidence of just how dramatic this
trend will become starts to stretch our imagination
beyond the bounds of reasonable comprehension.
In his recent book The Gen Z Effect, Thomas
Koulopoulos, Chairman of Boston-based think tank
Delphi Group, has projected that, with user
computing devices increasing since 1960 by one
order of magnitude in each decade, by 2100 there
will be 100 times as many individual computing
devices and sensors connected to the IoT as there
are grains of sand on all of the world’s beaches.2
That creates an almost inconceivably large
network of devices that will connect virtually every
object and person on the planet.
Ray Kurzweil, famed inventor, Founder of
Singularity University, and Google’s Director of
Engineering, has taken that notion even further to
suggest that the rate of increase in computing
power and proliferation is not just exponential, but
also accelerating in its exponential growth,
approaching what he calls “The Singularity”—a
point at which we will have virtually unlimited
power, storage, bandwidth, and ubiquity of
computers and sensors.3 The implications of this
There are certain things in the future that you know will happen. The real challenge is figuring out what’s possible now and how exactly do you make it… These big computing platforms [Oculus] come around every 10 years. I think it’s time to start working on the next one… We're serious about doing this the right way and building out these ecosystems. (2015)
- Mark Zuckerberg
accelerating exponential growth are
beyond revolutionary; they disrupt the
very foundation upon which we build
business, economies, and society.
The world where everyone and everything
is connected has arrived. And along with it comes
an entirely new way to look at how businesses
operate - Digital Business Ecosystems.
T h e T i p p i n g Po i n t
Digital Business Ecosystems are an
evolutionary quantum leap in how industries are
being transformed from disconnected entities to
networks of strategically aligned and intensely
collaborative communities. These hyperconnected
communities tear down the boundaries between
companies and within industries as well as those
Digital Business Ecosystems
2
Business Ecosystems have continued to alter the
landscape since. IBM’s strategic partnership with
Under Armour to release the UA Record™
application, which combines IBM Watson analytics
and data with fitness data collected through the UA
community, to energize customer engagement is
just one of many examples.7,8
The ecosystems trend is also not just
isolated to business partnerships. It is becoming
pervasive in nearly every aspect of modern
society. For example, Digital Business Ecosystems
are shaping the strategy of major corporations
such as GE, which announced a dramatic decision
to move their headquarters to Boston in order to
access the existing ecosystem of universities.9
between customers and suppliers. The walls that
separated the myriad participants in a process are
dissolving into bits and bytes as they turn into the
digital glue that holds ecosystems together.
Gartner calls it the “death of distance”.4 Without
the constraints of geography and the simultaneous
collapse of the time it takes to collect information
and to connect to resources, people, and
processes, we are experiencing the emergence of
a real-time world in which opportunity is separated
by just nanoseconds from new business models to
monetize it. Take for example the rise of cloud
sourcing5 and cloud funding platforms such as
Indiegogo and Kickstarter as a way to launch new
businesses with zero up-front capital and in a
fraction of the time that would normally be required
to ramp up a new business model.
Change is accelerating. Just as Nicholas
Negroponte, founder of the MIT Media Lab
predicted in 1984,6 industries, products and
services are converging and reforming as digital
connections cross industries and populations at a
rate that takes your breath away. In this new
reality businesses don't just change every so often,
therefore they need to be architected and built for
change!
This is not the future; it is here today. You
only have to look at the headlines to see it’s
already happened!
Just a few years ago, upstarts like Uber &
Airbnb revolutionized the taxi and hospitality
industries. Many other fascinating alliances and
notable strategies for leveraging new Digital
The battle of devices has now become a war of ecosystems… our competitors aren’t taking our market share with devices; they are taking our market share with an entire ecosystem. This means we’re going to have to decide how we either build, catalyze, or join an ecosystem. (2015)
- Stephen Elop, CEO of Nokia
The brilliance of GE's move is not the relocation
(which seems to fly in the face of a globally
connected ecosystem), but rather that they are
leveraging an existing network of exceptional
Digital Business Ecosystems
3
This proliferation of technology is rapidly
reshaping our society and economy. A recent
article by Forbes Tech “The Rise of Digital
Ecosystems in the We Economy” describes how
ecosystems create a new era of digi tal
orchestration: “The new power brokers will be the master orchestrators that place themselves at the
center of these digital ecosystems. These leaders
will quickly master new digital relationships with
their customers, end users, suppliers, alliance
partners, developers, data sources, makers of
smart devices, and sources of specialty talent. All
will share the same goals: to grow new markets…
and their individual businesses.”10
In short, by drawing on ever-increasing
connected communities and by mobilizing
disparate and historically disconnected resources,
digital ecosystems create a new framework for the
economics of competition. With every significant
shift, there will be winners and losers: those who
recognize the value of Digi tal Business
Ecosystems and build their business around them,
and those who don't. The evidence is already
clear that the same old methods of doing business
no longer work; they simply increase the burden of
complexity under which many businesses
ultimately fail.
Just look at the accelerating “topple rate” –
the rate at which companies fall off or “topple” from
the Fortune 500 or Global 2000 list. Every year for
talent (recognized for innovation and imagination)
within the unique ecosystem of universities that
already exists in a state where technology thrives
and leaders are embracing the intentional
architecting of the future—echoing GE's greater
strategy of being at the center of a vast
orchestrated Digital Business Ecosystem. While
relocation may seem counter-intuitive in a world of
hyperconnectivity, GE illustrates the strategic
imperative of considering the real world. When
you pull back and look at their larger objectives the
reason for the move becomes obvious. The big
shift in Digital Business Ecosystems is building,
participating and strengthening the entire
ecosystem for the shared benefit of all through
strategic alignment.
All of this is pointing to a new era of
hyperconnected organizations that are making the
concept of ecosystems central to their strategy and
growth. And yet, we are still at the very beginning
of this phenomenon.
T h e E c o n o m i c I m p a c t o fC o n n e c t i n g E v e r y t h i n g a n d E v e r y o n e
Interoperability has become so omnipresent that entire business e c o s y s t e m s c a n b e d i g i t a l l y represented, enabling profoundly improved productivity and customer experiences.
- Gordon Earle, CEO of Arrayworks
Digital Business Ecosystems
�6
the past 12 years, approximately 21 companies
vanished from the Fortune 500 list, reflecting a
turnover of nearly 70% over the past 20 years
alone. The average time spent on the Fortune 500
is accelerating downwards: currently at 14 years
on average, down from 35 years in 1970.11
Add to this the fact that we are quickly
approaching a point of universal access to the
Internet, creating a global economic engine that
will add billions to the workforce—again, without
regard to geographic location—and it’s clear that
the way we source and manage talent will require
the ability to orchestrate resources that no longer
conform to traditional notions of organizational or
even national boundaries.
The economic impact of Digital Business
Ecosystems and their ability to accelerate the
creation of economic value will be profound. In a
recent Forbes article Janus Bryzek, the father of
sensors, was quoted as saying that, “the “Industrial
Internet has the potential to add $10 to $15 trillion
(with a “T”) to global GDP over the next 20 years,
and Cisco [is] increasing to $19 trillion its forecast
for the economic value created by the “Internet of
Everything” in the year 2020. This is the largest
growth in the history of humans”.12
When you consider all of the evidence, it’s
clear that the ecosystem phenomenon will be the
defining factor in business competition and the
economy at large over the next 100 years,
changing the landscape of business as radically as
the industrial revolution changed business over the
last 200 years.
The new power brokers will be the master orchestrators that place themselves at the center of these digital ecosystems. These leaders will q u i c k l y m a s t e r n e w d i g i t a l relationships with their customers, end users , suppl iers , a l l iance partners, developers, data sources, makers of smart devices, and sources of specialty talent. All will share the same goals: to grow new markets… and their individual businesses.12
Digital Business Ecosystems
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Haven’t businesses always been part of
an ecosystem with suppliers, partners, alliances,
government regulators, and customers? Yes, but
t radi t ional business ecosystems evolved
organically, meaning they grew randomly and
opportunistically as the market grew. Organic
ecosystems create large amounts of friction and
inefficiency among its participants.
Giants such as Ford, which has over
40,000 partners and suppliers, or Walmart, with
70,000 suppliers, created steep barriers to entry
through their processes and dictated strict
conformance to them from their suppliers. The
enormous burden of this complexity created
business processes that were more like fortresses,
designed to keep competition out.
Yesterday’s approach served the industry
titans exceptionally well since it made entering
their markets, and threatening their leadership,
nearly impossible without significant capital
investment from the outset. Yet, every industry -
from banking and finance to healthcare to
education - has been shackled by complicated
ways of doing business that ended up permeating
the industry like the fat in ground beef. In each
case however, the ultimate casualty was
innovation.
Conversely, today’s Digital Business
Ecosystems (with emphasis on the word Digital)
are intentionally architected to minimize friction,
increase the utilization of assets, and accelerate
It is critical to redefine how you interact with your entire business ecosystem… Welcome to the cognitive era…. to think fast, move faster. (2015)
- Ginni Rometti, CEO of IBM
A r c h i t e c t i n g E c o s y s t e m s
innovation through higher levels of collaboration,
ultimately removing latency, inefficiency, and costs.
It’s these architected ecosystems that are taking
center stage and which are becoming the new
engines of innovation.
Digital Business Ecosystems
TABLE OF CONTENTS
SBLIA case study on how SBLI leveraged technology to create a business ecosystem, reducing friction, increasing collaboration, and enhancing the customer experience.
In 1907, during one the worst stock market crashes in US history, Louis D. Brandeis (who later became a US Supreme Court Justice ) founded SBLI with the simple idea to do what many thought was impossible, provide affordable, dependable life insurance to all families who needed it.
Since its founding, SBLI has thrived, expanding its geographical reach and product range while still remaining true to Justice Brandeis’s original vision. SBLI is also committed to the communities it serves and supports hundreds of charitable causes across the country. Today SBLI has over $125 Billion of life insurance in force.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
By using advanced ecosystem visualization tools and entity models that l inked together disparate processes, tasks, and people, the SBLI solution empowered agents with one centralized access point, which coordinated all of the pieces and partners in the ecosystem.
Financial services, and the life insurance
industry in particular, is comprised of an incredibly
fragmented set of partners, an abundance of
policies and procedures, regulatory compliance,
complex processes with myriad touch points, and
complicated personalized products which require
detailed and responsive communication with
customers.
Yet, the time and effort required to sell
and service life insurance is key to keeping costs
down and delivering affordable products. Since
SBLI’s mission is to provide affordable life
insurance, it has to stay on the forefront of
technology. But simply investing in numerous best
of breed systems did not create an ecosystem.
Instead it created a labor-intensive and time-
consuming maze of partners, processes, systems,
and people that needed to be coordinated in large
part through manual intervention.
For example, industry solutions have
many different marketing systems and partners
that often produce duplicate instances of the same
customer information, which lead to prospective
customers being contacted by multiple parties,
creating a less than optimal customer experience.
This also meant that there were simply too many
systems to access and too much time involved in
getting the information needed to pre-screen
applicants and determine what product options
applied, and even more time to then quote rates
and illustrate coverage.
In addition, life insurance applications are
labor intensive and fraught with inefficiencies and
delays spread across the entire ecosystem. This
r e s u l t e d i n e x t e n s i v e e m a i l o r p h o n e
communications, which eroded the customer
experience and often resulted in a lack of
response and in buyer’s remorse—one of the
greatest barriers to entry undermining their efforts
to create value.
All of these fragmented processes and
systems create an enormous burden of case
management since companies like SBLI have to
manually construct a case from its myriad sources
of data in order to accurately respond to prospects
and customers.
All of these challenges apply to every
player in the insurance industry; however, SBLI
took the lead in identifying ways to reduce the
friction in its business processes since its mission
is specifically to deliver the most affordable
policies.
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T h e E c o s y s t e m s C h a l l e n g e :
TABLE OF CONTENTS
SBLI used an ecosystems approach
delivered by ArrayWorks to restructure its
disconnected maze of systems. By using
advanced ecosystem visualization tools and entity
models that linked together disparate processes,
tasks, and people, it empowered agents with one
centralized access point, which coordinated all of
the pieces and partners in the ecosystem. By
presenting all of this in one seamless front end,
SBLI created a complete on-demand view of the
customer throughout the sale and servicing of a
policy, thereby reducing response times and
increasing the value of the overall customer
FIGURE 1
experience, as well as opening the door to ongoing
innovation of new products and services. Unlike a
simple portal, however, this view was dynamic and
able to adapt instantly to changes, both on the
back end when existing systems were modified or
new systems added, and on the front end where
sales required changes in how they accessed the
various resources available to write a new policy.
By using an ecosystem entity modeling approach,
SBLI was able to connect every piece of the
process and every source of data to every other
piece. This provided near infinite flexibility in how
the overall system delivered value in creating a
trusted and complete view of the process,
customer, and product, resulting in far more
responsive customer experiences.
T h e E c o s y s t e m s S o l u t i o n :
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
T h e E c o s y s t e m s B e n e f i t s
S M A R T D ATA C A P T U R E
S I N G L E D ATA E N T R Y
P R O C E S S C O N S I S T E N C Y
R E D U C E D C Y C L E T I M E
Q U I C K E R T I M E T O M O N E Y
S T R A I G H T T H R U P R O C E S S I N G
S I M P L I S T I C O N E - S T O P S H O P P I N G
S I G N I F I C A N T LY R E D U C E D F R I C T I O N
I N T H E P R O C E S S
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Whether your organization is a unicorn or an upstart, an Inc500 or a Fortune500, the greatest opportunity and the greatest threat will be how well you incorporate Digital Business Ecosystems into every facet of your business. Here are some of the key opportunities and implications of Digital Business Ecosystems.
Key Opportunities and Imperatives of Digital Ecosystems
In almost all of the above opportunities and imperatives one thing is common, the importance of adopting
a new view of the organization as an expansive network of relationships and alliances that need to be
understood and managed not from the inside out through ownership, but rather from the outside in as
strategically aligned collaborators.
Business process management (BPM) and
Six Sigma wil l need to evolve to
complement and support Digital Business
Ecosystems by addressing cross-organizational
processes, which are fluid and dynamically
adaptive to new business opportunities and agile
reconfiguration of the ecosystem.
Digital Business Ecosystems create higher
levels of collaboration, co-creation, and
innovation. For example, in the SBLI case
study, adopting an inclusive ecosystem strategy
allowed SBLI to discover and create a direct
connection between some of its major distributors,
thus eliminating what had been weeks of friction in
the application process.
Recognizing that few, if any, companies
can “go it alone,” business leaders need to
figure out how to orchestrate processes,
capabilities, assets, products, and services
dynamically across a wide range of organizations
with shared interests. This creates the ability to
innovate for new opportunities and threats as an
ecosystem.
2
Digital Business Ecosystems create the
opportunity to expand capabilities around
your business core without owning them,
as in the case of Uber.
4
1
3Minimizing or removing existing friction
(costs, inefficiency, latency, and poor
resource utilization) will create new
opportunities for businesses to not only streamline
existing processes, but also free up resources for
new innovation initiatives.
5An outside-in strategy, which supports
collaborative business models involving
complex networks of participants, will lead
to a much more comprehensive view of the
possible services and products that an ecosystem
can deliver. For example, Amazon’s recent
announcement to partner with Boeing to create an
ecosystem model for package delivery illustrates
how otherwise separate companies can
collaborate to identify new areas to create value for
customers.13
6Governance will take on a new and
expanded role in a Digital Business
Ecosystem since the user-base, by
definition, extends well beyond any single
company, requiring strong profile-driven security
and resource segmentation. For example, HIPPA
requirements in the health industry and regulatory
requirements, such as Sarbanes-Oxley, in financial
services will need to be incorporated into the
ecosystems model.
Rather than simply responding to change,
ecosystem businesses will be built for
change through the use of tools such as
Enterprise Applications Platforms (discussed further
in the next section), which support a degree of
partnering complexity previously not possible.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
K E Y O P P O RT U N I T I E S
Working From The Outside In - Strategies For Leveraging Digital Business EcosystemsCompetitive advantage is now the result of an entirely different strategy that requires a new set of tools and approaches which look at a business process well outside of the four walls of any single organization.
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Stra
tegy
Service
Product
Ow
ners
hip
Throughout the last century there has been a slow but
steady shift from the notion of standardized products
and clearly delineated organizational boundaries (think
of the Ford model where the product was “any color as
long as it’s black” and where every supplier was owned
or controlled by Ford) to networks held together mostly
by strategic alignment where nearly every product is
sold with a service or experience component.
Orchestrating these complex networks of partners,
alliances, regulators, and customers is the fundamental
shift from the industrial and information era models to
the Digital Business Ecosystem model, in the upper right
quadrant of this figure.
Rather than being focused on the inside-out processes
and resources of any single organization, process
management now needs to focus on the outside-in
where resources are shared and distributed across an
ecosystem.
T h e M o s t S i g n i f i c a n t S h i f t i n B P M
FIGURE 3
Digital Business Ecosystems’ strategies
reflect a significant shift from an inside-out
perspective, to one that looks at the entire
ecosystem from the outside-in. Pulling, digesting,
and interpreting data from across the full breadth
of the Digital Business Ecosystem and then acting
on the trusted insights that this data provides is a
critical part of this fundamental shift.
Although Digital Business Ecosystems
reduce friction in a business process, among
alliance partners, and within a marketplace, they
are difficult to represent. In an ecosystem, the
processes and systems used across a network of
business partners creates a level of collaboration
and innovation that is far more inclusive and
responsive by leveraging the collective knowledge
and resources of the ecosystem.
Traditional BPM works well in areas where
a business has established, well-understood
transactional processes, but they fall short when
the rate of change and scope of a process
encompasses many disparate parties. However,
trying to confine a process to one organization, or
using differing process automation tools across
multiple organizations, is simply unsustainable.
While driving friction out is often considered an
internal exercise, the greatest friction and
ineffic iency is a lways between mul t ip le
organizations’ processes. Taking an outside-in
view of the process, as an ecosystem and not as
just a collection of organizations, dramatically
decreases process friction.
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If the ecosystem model is already
changing your industry, as it will every industry,
how will your business have to change to
accommodate this new reality? The answer lies in
the evolution of a new set of tools for enabling
enterprise application platforms.
Strategists and thought leaders alike
characterize Digital Business Ecosystems as a
revolutionary new era in business strategy, and
pinpoint a new breed of Enterprise Application
Platforms as the engines that are fueling amazing
transformations.
Whi le the concep t o f En te rp r i se
Application Platforms (EAPs) is not entirely new,
until recently they have largely been homegrown
solutions intended to bring together a narrow
subset of knowledge, people, and resources.
These were not portable or scalable solutions; they
only worked within very isolated situations.
Creating Digital Business Ecosystems
demands an entirely new way of looking at and
enabling fluid business interactions across a
network of diverse participants. What are starting
to evolve are highly configurable EAPs that
dynamically link internal and external resources.
They are built to manage a complex set of
interrelated activities and people that constantly
reconfigure themselves, in order to address the
opportunity or challenge at hand in the most
expedient and effective way. Alliance partners are
able to co-create new opportunities based on
insights that could not have otherwise been known
or leveraged.
To tap into these insights a new field of
Data Science is expanding to create competitive
advantage.14 Data Science is the study of patterns
in data and behavior (of people, objects, and
transactions) to identify new opportunities for
creating value. For example, by studying
consumer patterns of behavior, retailers such as
Amazon can better target and predict customers’
needs. In a Digital Business Ecosystem this takes
on a much larger role of re-orchestrating a value
chain to meet market needs and value chain
capabilities. As described in the book Cloud
Surfing,15 companies such as E2Open are doing
this across vast ecosystems, such as the suppliers
of parts for the Boeing 787 Superliner, to
reconfigure the value chain in a way the best
optimizes the potential partners and suppliers. This
happens in an autonomic way so that the
ecosystem responds to changes without manual
intervention. The result is an intelligence that is
now being built into the ecosystem and which
responds immediately to markets.
This same phenomenon is also being
seen in the automobile industry where players
such as Covisint have built EAPs for enormous
Digital Business Ecosystems that orchestrate
thousands of suppliers, partners, and alliances
across all of the major manufacturers.16
A N E W P L AT F O R M F O R B U I L D I N G D I G I TA L B U S I N E S S E C O SYST E M S
Digital Business Ecosystems
18
One of the most important, but also least
expected, benefits of these vast ecosystems is that
the relationships being managed and the data
being collected about these relationships can be
used to understand behavioral patterns between
and among all of the resources and the
transactions of which they are part. Data scientists
call this sort of view of digital behavior a
“longitudinal view” because it cuts across any
number of selected resources, allowing you to
mine the process. In health care the longitudinal
view is radically altering the way research into
diseases is being approached by identifying
patterns in data that would otherwise be invisible
to researchers who were focused on just a narrow
slice of the health care system. For instance, when
you combine the data that flows between health
care providers, insurance payers, patient
behaviors, and pharmaceuticals, you not only
remove the friction in the health care system, but
you also start to see new unanticipated
relationships.
The problem has been that the patterns
we know to look for are not the only patterns that
lead to solutions and significant new value
creation. This is why so much of invention and
discovery has historically happened as the result
of accidental or serendipitous occurrences. Being
able to make this sort of discovery systemic
amplifies your ability to innovate and create new
value.
EAPs need to incorporate these new data
science capabilities in order to provide immediate
access to new trends and insights. A simple
example of how this might work is shown in
Figure 2.
16
FIGURE 2 Data mining is a critical part of any Digital Business Ecosystem because it exposes trends and
behaviors that can deliver key insights on how products and services are being used and indicators of
new market needs. In this example, a unique visual representation of three pie charts is used to depict
the buying patterns for golf clubs. In the top chart we see the distribution of golf club sales by
geographic region. Exploding one wedge of this chart shows the sales in the Southwest region by club
type, in the lower left pie chart. Drilling down even further, in the bottom right pie chart, we see the types
of golf clubs most commonly purchased in the Southwest region along with a driver purchase. Data
mining of this sort can lead to a better understanding of the demand in order to respond to market
opportunities.
Digital Business Ecosystems
17
The complexity of a digital ecosystem
requires a new way of looking at and navigating
business processes, partnerships, alliances and
customer relationships. Yet it’s striking to consider
that process flow diagrams (which are used to
describe and navigate complex processes) haven't
changed much in the past 100 years, dating back
to 1921 when Frank Gilbreth first introduced
them”17 Because of the complexity of Digital
Business Ecosystems, an advanced approach to
visualization is also emerging that fits directly into
the ecosystems view of process automation. We
already looked at one example of this in the SBLI
case study (Figure 1). However, there is another
V I S UA L I Z I N G E N T I R E E C O SYST E M S
way to visualize the relationships between various
resources in a business ecosystem in real-time.
FIGURE 3 This eco-view of a Digital Business
Ecosystem provides a complex description of the
many relationships of a financial services firm. The
expansiveness of this sort of network of
relationships can be daunting at first glance.
However, a new metaphor exists that allows you to
fly through the network, drill down into its individual
elements, and easily navigate all of the
relationships depicted. This eco-view is not static. It
is constantly changing and can be dynamically
navigated in real time. Go to www.arrayworks.com/
eco-view to see a short video example of how you
can navigate even the most complex ecosystems
with a simple touch screen interface.
Digital Business Ecosystems
18
visualize, orchestrate, leverage, and enable the
complexity and the power of all the diverse
resources included in the ecosystem.
As Digital Business Ecosystems evolve,
the opportunities to create new business models,
constructs, and new levels of innovation will
accelerate rapidly—in fact, as we said at the
beginning of this white paper, exponentially. The
result will be an unprecedented rate of new value
creation.
The ability to visualize business in real-
time using a metaphor that more closely
resembles the dynamic and adaptive nature of an
ecosystem, the ability to change process models
so that they are constantly synchronized with the
entire network of participants who form the
ecosystem, and the ability to analyze the vast data
created by an ecosystem, in ways never
contemplated by a business or technology
architect, are all becoming competitive mandates.
The net benefit of all of this change is simple but
profound: a level of collaboration and orchestration
that will make us cringe at how primitive business
was before the advent of Digital Business
Ecosystems.
Yet, as with most radical advancements,
taking advantage of the change means not being
held hostage by the past. Whether you adapt to
the ecosystem model or not, it is already changing
your industry as it will every industry. The good
news is that you do not need to adopt a wait-and-
see attitude towards Digital Business Ecosystems
because the change has already begun.
This unique fly-through view of the
organization’s resources creates an ecosystems
solution that is infinitely flexible and which allows
you to better understand the complex and
multifaceted relationships between resources.
What’s especially radical about this tool is the
ability to build and view a process in this approach
in real time based on the requirements of the
scenario at hand.
EAPs will play a pivotal role in enabling
Digital Business Ecosystems. However not all
EAPs are created specifically to work in an
ecosystems framework. The specific capabilities to
look for are extensive, however, here is a quick
look at some of the things to look for in an eco-
friendly EAP:
• Solutions that are architected to offer rich
representation of the elements of
ecosystems and the co-evolving
relationship between ecosystem
participants,
• Visualization tools to dynamically view
data and analyze relationships between
elements,
• The ability to Animate and Reanimate how
data moves/flows in and between
participants,
• The ability to easily and in real-time
Monitor and Modify processes,
• The Ability to Mobilize networks of
collaboration.
By providing these tools, an EAP can support a
Digital Business Ecosystem by making it easier to
C O N C LU S I O N
Digital Business Ecosystems
19
This white paper was authored by Delphi Group, thought leaders in
leading edge trends for business and technology for over 25 years.
www.delphigroup.com [email protected]
©2016 ArrayWorks Any Trademarks used are the property of their respective owners
Contributions to this white paper from Arrayworks, Inc., a
low-code Enterprise Application Development Platform
www.arrayworks.com [email protected]
©2016 ArrayWorks
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E n d n o t e s
Digital Business Ecosystems